Will the fun and ease of Redbox’s unique impulse proposition last through the next decade?
As recently as four years ago, almost no one would have been aware of what the word Redbox meant. Today, Americans have become devoted customers of this rising star of the impulse DVD rental industry. But will the fun and ease of Redbox’s unique impulse proposition last through the next decade? Do advances in technology, with an ever-changing array of readily available options, such as downloads or streaming, mean that the days of the Redbox are numbered?
From a user’s perspective, the game is a great deal for $2, to be able to test a costly new game by renting it out from Redbox, and to purchase only after making an informed decision. The price-value proposition opens the door to a youth and low-budget market which traditionally shuns rentals because games cannot be “watched” in one day. Even the former partner of Mitch Lowe and current CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings, has acknowledged the market for rentals in that “ video games very much are (exclusively) a disc-based solution – it’s very unlikely that we’ll be adding N64′s GoldenEye 007 to our queue alonside the James Bond DVD GoldenEye.”
[This article has been reproduced with permission from Knowledge Network, the online thought leadership platform for Thunderbird School of Global Management https://thunderbird.asu.edu/knowledge-network/]